Barret also said that redxiii could be full of "bullshit". so, it makes sense that they have a funny, tense relationship. IT's fine, really.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Spoilers Thread, Part 2: Stay Kalm & Mosey Along (UPDATE: Ultimania’s list of four key story changes)
- Thread starter Quinton
- Start date
If they wanted to keep biggs and jessie alive in a logical fashion that actually would've been totally fine.
My problem is that they have these incredible drawn out death scenes with unique ,fully orchestrated music.
And they then go ahead and completely make all of that pointless.
It also makes the whole sector 7 collapse almost without any consequence.
This is the real problem with what they're doing here.
You can count on nothing having any sense of meaning or consequence behind it ,moving forward.
At any moment they could go " plot armor lol timeline".
My problem is that they have these incredible drawn out death scenes with unique ,fully orchestrated music.
And they then go ahead and completely make all of that pointless.
It also makes the whole sector 7 collapse almost without any consequence.
This is the real problem with what they're doing here.
You can count on nothing having any sense of meaning or consequence behind it ,moving forward.
At any moment they could go " plot armor lol timeline".
Jessie is definitely dead. It's mentioned in the chapter log.
Biggs....might be dead still in the Remake timeline.
Why would she be dead and not Biggs ?
They were both in the exact same situation and the plate collapsed on them.
What would be the basis for her death but not biggs' ? The datalog ?
The Chapter log mentions Jessie is dead while it says Biggs is heavily injured so it leaves the door open for maye Biggs being alive in the Remake timeline.
Kinda feel a little more confident about something now. In an earlier seen with Aerith when she's talking to the flowers in her yard with Cloud, she says:
Im Guessing that what she's referring to here is the Arbiters of Fate. Currently, as they exist now, they are blocking the Planet's voices from being heard [by those who are able to listen, such as the Cetra]. These "voices of the planet" were also referenced in chapter 18 when Aerith gives her monologue, stating that Sephiroth doesn't hear their voices crying out in pain, like rain falling off his back.
So she seems to be foreshadowing the ending battle against the Harbinger. The weird thing is, the whispers and the harbinger are a creature of the planet, and it's implied that they too are among its voices. So why does she have to "take the final step" to destroy them or at least defeat them, before we can hear the planet properly?
The only thing that makes sense to me is that The Whispers have been infected by Sephiroth, to some degree even controlled by him (hence why some whispers are purple instead of just gray). This must mean that the final battle is really to remove this barrier, which is likely cause by this a Jenova/Sephiroth infection of the lifestream within the planet. That may even be why Aerith cannot fully understand them yet: because the infection is still there.
Edit: does anyone know what Aerith says in Japanese in this same flower scene?
Im Guessing that what she's referring to here is the Arbiters of Fate. Currently, as they exist now, they are blocking the Planet's voices from being heard [by those who are able to listen, such as the Cetra]. These "voices of the planet" were also referenced in chapter 18 when Aerith gives her monologue, stating that Sephiroth doesn't hear their voices crying out in pain, like rain falling off his back.
So she seems to be foreshadowing the ending battle against the Harbinger. The weird thing is, the whispers and the harbinger are a creature of the planet, and it's implied that they too are among its voices. So why does she have to "take the final step" to destroy them or at least defeat them, before we can hear the planet properly?
The only thing that makes sense to me is that The Whispers have been infected by Sephiroth, to some degree even controlled by him (hence why some whispers are purple instead of just gray). This must mean that the final battle is really to remove this barrier, which is likely cause by this a Jenova/Sephiroth infection of the lifestream within the planet. That may even be why Aerith cannot fully understand them yet: because the infection is still there.
Edit: does anyone know what Aerith says in Japanese in this same flower scene?
Last edited:
Following your thought, it would mean that Aerith hesitates to enter that portal, because she knows by defeating an infected fate entity, we'll also destroy the whole aspect of it.
Does that mean in the next game Aerith has access to a new, clearer guiding by the voices of the planet, but the whole intervention by "fate" is not there anymore if things go, respective to the original events, awry?
Does that mean in the next game Aerith has access to a new, clearer guiding by the voices of the planet, but the whole intervention by "fate" is not there anymore if things go, respective to the original events, awry?
The whole thing with Aerith, I feel, is that she's torn between a known measure, a fate that she knows how unfolds - even if badly for her and somewhat arguably bad for humanity - and the vast unknown of possibility. Follow Fate and the Planet, because they know better or try to change things and maybe mess them up even further.
Defeating Fate and trailing a new path is, by her own words "boundless, terrifying freedom".
Defeating Fate and trailing a new path is, by her own words "boundless, terrifying freedom".
Maybe now she can get the help of the lifestream without having to die :P
Feels like if Jessie is dead then Biggs would be deader lol
Either she lives, or the remainder of the story will see no other major changes as Kitase claims. Both can't be true.
I just wanna say producer/director/writer lies/misleads all the time :p
I figured "final step" meant dying and becoming one with the planet.
This is a ways off, but I have some ideas for how they could handle a certain scenario in what I think will be Part 3:
Vs. Diamond Weapon
Fighting the Godzilla-sized Diamond Weapon is hard to imagine with the party alone, since it's doubtful it will send out smaller extensions of itself like the Harbinger did with the three Whispers.
However...
What if prior to the battle, there is a cutscene where the party obtains a summoning materia that flickers oddly, like a lightbulb on the fritz, and it doesn't appear to work... until a cutscene at the start of this battle where, regardless of whether you have it equipped, it is shown glowing a full red and it summons, with no time limit...
Alexander, the cathedral colossus. It preoccupies Diamond Weapon while the party focuses on its feet or tail to throw it off balance so Alexander can deal devastating blows. Or something like that.
Or perhaps in this sequence the player is on rails in the Highwind firing artillery cannons at Diamond Weapon to soften it up for Alexander. Midgar's Sister Ray is still what ultimately kills Diamond Weapon, though. I imagine a Highwind fight of this sort would also work nicely for Ultima Weapon in the skies over Mideel.
Just some ideas. Would make for epic spectacle and marketing material.
Vs. Diamond Weapon
Fighting the Godzilla-sized Diamond Weapon is hard to imagine with the party alone, since it's doubtful it will send out smaller extensions of itself like the Harbinger did with the three Whispers.
However...
What if prior to the battle, there is a cutscene where the party obtains a summoning materia that flickers oddly, like a lightbulb on the fritz, and it doesn't appear to work... until a cutscene at the start of this battle where, regardless of whether you have it equipped, it is shown glowing a full red and it summons, with no time limit...
Alexander, the cathedral colossus. It preoccupies Diamond Weapon while the party focuses on its feet or tail to throw it off balance so Alexander can deal devastating blows. Or something like that.
Or perhaps in this sequence the player is on rails in the Highwind firing artillery cannons at Diamond Weapon to soften it up for Alexander. Midgar's Sister Ray is still what ultimately kills Diamond Weapon, though. I imagine a Highwind fight of this sort would also work nicely for Ultima Weapon in the skies over Mideel.
Just some ideas. Would make for epic spectacle and marketing material.
Biggs is lower down the pillar and didn't blow up his way out with bombs the way Jessie did. It would've been fairly easy for someone to extract Biggs before the pillar collapsed, especially considering Cloud finds Biggs WAY before he reaches the top. Not so for Jessie.
FFVII Remake: The Sequel No One Asked For
It's been 3 days since I finished Final Fantasy VII: Remake. I've been unpacking a lot of thoughts. I was always very skeptical of the remake since it's reveal for a myriad of reasons:
1. Switching the combat from turn based to real time after the horror that was FFXV
2. Chopping the game into pieces
3. Making changes to the story.
4. Fear of padding the game up with useless fluff and crappy modern fetch quests.
5. Fear of Nomura Nomuraing things up.
Having finished the game, some of my fears were clearly warranted (awful side quests, padding, Nomura), others turned out to be my favorite decisions the team made (action based combat, so goooood). At the end of the day, the state of Final Fantasy VII Remake has left me confused as to if I loved it or hated it, and honestly, it's complicated. Can it be both?
Bait and Switch
Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: FFVII Remake is NOT a remake, it's a straight up sequel. Perhaps "Redo" would be a more apropos term? Quite frankly this game is the biggest bait and switch we've had in a AAA game since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty introduced us to Raiden.
Viewed as a sequel, I FUCKING LOVE THIS GAME.
It's one of the best things to come out of SquareEnix in years. Viewed as a REMAKE of one of the most beloved games of all time however, it fails on every level and I hate it with a passion.
Here's the problem: we were sold a remake, but got a sequel.
The lore of FFVII Remake rests firmly on the shoulders of FFVII so much so, that I feel bad for newcomers to the game. There's SO MUCH that goes on in the final chapters of the game that is directly reliant on knowledge of FFVII to understand the stakes going on. Nomura and crew seem to have designed the game explicitly for veteran FFVII players who know and understand the stakes from having played FFVII to its completion at the expense of new players hoping FFVII Remake IS the definitive experience of Final Fantasy VII, which it's not.
Having played through the original FFVII recently, I can confidently say FFVII is the first and largest barrier to entry to the new player. The 1997 original FFVII is a VERY flawed piece of media in 2020. Hell, the original FFVII was already a flawed piece of media just 5 years after its original release: the art styles featured within the game were schizophrenic at best, the translation was subpar, and some of the scenes have aged like fine mayonnaise … that's been left out in the sun…for a week. I'm looking at you "fun snowboarding minigame after you just buried your girlfriend scene.
An Alternate Dimension
Let's go back in time to 2014. Final Fantasy VII Remake has not been announced. We're at the Playstation Experience. Final Fantasy Brand Manager, Shinji Hashimoto, comes out and announces: "FINAL FANTASY VII Remastered" is coming to Playstation in 2015!
Final Fantasy Remastered is THE DEFINITIVE version of Final Fantasy VII:
· It looks NOTHING like Advent Children (nothing against Advent Children, I love it)
· It features a completely redone translation with no voice acting.
· Static 2D backgrounds remastered and now presented in HD widescreen format.
· Turn based combat with updated graphics. (on the level of say Trials of Mana)
· A complete redo of the chibi character models that now more closely match the chibi character design art.
· All the art style is now coherent.
· Remade cinematics that look closer in quality to FFXI.
· The entire game is made for a very modest budget compared to FFVII Remake
"Well," you think, "This isn't exactly what I expected given how cool the PS3 FFVII tech demo was back in 2005, but this is pretty great! The art style is no longer schizophrenic, the translation is good, and I don't have to juggle 800 mods on the PC to get a decent looking game. It doesn't look like Advent Children, but it's a hell of a lot better than playing 1997 PSOne FFVII now with characters consisting of 8 polygons…"
Then, in 2018, at Sony's E3 Press Conference, Square Enix unveils Final Fantasy VII: Whispered Destiny. It's the Final Fantasy VII Remake we got in this dimension, and instead of being divisive, everyone is completely on board with Kitase and Nomura enlisting the player to help Cloud and company fight fate.
You Were the Bad Guy All Along
Obviously what I've presented is not the time line we're in, and we have FFVII Remake and its ending, which is divisive to say the least, and I believe the ending is divisive not because long time fans couldn't go along with it, but rather because Nomura not so subtly frames the players who have been asking for a proper Final Fantasy VII remake that has all the same story beats they loved in 1997 with a shiny new paint job as the bad guy.
This Whispers in FFVII, the ghost looking knock off Harry Potter dementors that constantly accost the characters in FFVII Remake any time they attempt to go off script, are the manifestation of the player base who wanted the story to stay the same as the original game. Nomura and company frame these Whispers as "the bad guy" and enlist you the player's help to destroy them. You become complicit in the action, killing fate and subconsciously granting Normura the ability to do whatever he wants with the rest of the Final Fantasy VII story.
ANYTHING IS UP FOR GRABS!
· Zack's not dead and joins the party!
· Aerith doesn't have to die!
· Cid doesn't have to be a wife beater!
· Jessie and Cloud can have their date!
· Cait Sith can be ejected from the game's lore completely!
· Vincent's Limit Breaks don't suck!
· Sephiroth could win!
· Sephiroth could win??
And that's the point. Nomura and Kitase want long time players to have a new experience, to not know what's going to happen next. And I can appreciate that. I can. I'm actually pretty excited to see what happens next now that there are stakes again…
But at the end of the day, many players, myself included, are still missing that Final Fantasy VII Remake we've been begging SquareEnix to make for years for all the reasons I've listed multiple times now (but mostly the God awful schizophrenic art style shifts). Also, I wish they would have been upfront with me about the Remake and not subverted my expectations by calling it "Remake". I still would have bought it, but instead of being frustrated every time they deviated from the story, I could have enjoyed it. (My post history on ResetEra should tell you that I really disliked the game as I was playing it).
Required Reading Never Looked so Shitty
In retrospect, numbered Final Fantasy games not actually being sequels was one of the smartest design decisions ever. Videogames have a tendency to age incredibly poorly. Some games like Super Mario Bros. are timeless, but many others just don't age well for a myriad of reasons we won't get into here. So when a new Final Fantasy game comes out, you can generally just ignore the previous numbered game, because the new one is its own self-contained game.
But that isn't the case with FFVII Remake. As stated earlier, it's clearly a sequel. A sequel with "required reading". One advantage movies have to games with overarching narratives is that they're short and can be consumed in very little time. If everyone was jazzed to see Star Wars IX and you didn't see I through VIII, no big deal, you can catch up pretty quickly. Not the case with videogames which can span from 6 to 50+ hours for one entry in a series.
Another advantage movies have over games is that they tend to still be very watchable many many years later. I can show Star Wars from 1977 to a newcomer today and they'd probably come away liking it very much. I don't know that I can say the same for Final Fantasy VII. I can personally still enjoy it because I have nostalgia for it, but what would a new player born after the year 2000 seeing the original game think?
Now that the original FFVII is required viewing to properly understand FFVII Remake, will newcomers pick it up and play it in its current state? I would suggest not.
There's gambling on the part of SquareEnix here. FFVII Remake sold like gangbusters based because everyone expected it was a proper remake of FFVII, not a sequel. But how will Part II do? Will newcomers to FFVII stick with the game and move on to Part 2 having been left out of loop on the ending, or will they drop the series completely, not understanding WHY FFVII was a big deal in the first place? Will newcomers go "huh, that was weird" and buy/playthrough the original FFVII to get the context required by the ending to FFVII Remake? I don't know, but damn don't you think it'd be great if we had a proper FFVII Remastered edition for people to buy that would lower the barrier to entry? I do.
Have I not talked the Good Stuff yet?
There's of course more to FFVII Remake than the meta context of the story, and honestly, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the gameplay. I have some minor quibbles about party members basically standing around when you're not directly controlling them; seriously the number of times I would swap to Barrett and he's literally pointing away from the only enemy we're fighting were quite frustrating, but it didn't take away from the fact that the combat in FFVII Remake is good. Really good.
Am I grading it on a curve? Maybe.
I mean, the combat in FFVII Remake no Dark Souls or Devil May Cry, but it's a HUGE step forward from FFXV's combat situation where you only get to control one character, there's no magic to speak of (the magic item things don't count), and the camera actively got in your way. The combat in FFVII Remake is a really nice call back to the original FFVII, and the materia system was brought over intact, so props to Kitase and team. This was the one area I expected the team to turn in another FFXV or Kingdom Hearts and they didn't.
I would definitely like some quality of life improvements for FFVII Remake Part 2 though. There's a severe lack of "All" materia ("Magnify" in this game) that lets you target all your party or all enemies in the fight. And that's fine, I was okay with that limitation. But I wish there was a way to re-assign materia during the fight. There were a lot of instances where I'd get into a boss battle and analyze the boss and deal with its tactics for a bit and realize I had the wrong materia equipped to properly deal with the situation which would lead to a death and a lengthy loading screen. This was probably an issue on my first FFVII playthrough as well, but that was back in 1997 and I was 16, so who knows. Anyway, I think it'd be great if you could say spend 2 AP bars to get to a menu to swap materia.
There was much said about "air combat" being crappy in this game, and while I agree, it honestly didn't bother me too much in the long run, especially if I had Barrett in my party. For the sequel, I think it'd be cool if you could swap in and out characters on the fly as well. Make that cost AP too. "Crap a flying enemy, let me swap Tifa out for Barrett so I can shoot them out of the sky.
Because that's another thing the game did really well: making the 5 playable characters play very differently. In the original FFVII the characters basically all played the same, afterall, it was turn based combat, you directed them to attack, defend, use magic or items, and a skill here or there provided by materia and that was basically the end of it. The fact that Tifa has this crazy combo system, and Barrett is a walking turret and Aerith is a glass canon was really well executed. I very much loved how they gave Aerith a standard magical attack instead of having her smack things with her staff.
Let's Get Textural
Are there some issues with textures in FFVII being less than optimal. Yes. In my 40 hours of playing through the game did it hamper my experience? No, not really. There's a lot in FFVII to hate on. A LOT. But I really don't believe the graphics is one of them. The main cast of characters are some of the best looking characters in any game with realistic looking clothing and very expressive eyes and mouths. The set pieces are really good, and yes there's a LOT of copy and pasting going on with some of the environments, but that's not the graphic designer's fault. That's a different problem…
This Padding isn't so Fetching
Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a well-paced game. Its 40+ hour length seeks to be a value proposition since you're not getting the "full fat" FFVII experience, only the first 1/3rd of the first disc of the original game's content, but it only gets to this lengthy runtime through padding the game out with some of the most egregious time wasters I've ever seen in a game.
Maybe you're expecting me to mention the numerous fetch quests or squeezing through narrow gaps to conceal loading times as the worst offenders, and yeah they're pretty bad, but plenty of people have already talked about those. Yes, they're bad and I could have done with less of the standard JRPG trope sidequests to help a kid find her dumb cats but no…
No, the worst bits of padding in this game are the seconds the game adds onto top of just about everything. So much of this game forces Cloud to slowly walk. For no reason. In many cases it's in areas where we're not moving from place to place, so no loading should be going on, and yet, Cloud is forced to walk at a snail's pace, for no reason. The other bits of padding are also switches, levers, and buttons.
Why does Cloud have to sit and think about pressing a button, flipping a switch or pulling a lever? Every time, you sit and hold the triangle button for an agonizingly long time while Cloud just sits there with his hand on the lever…. Till…eventually… finally… any day now…. He just nonchalantly flips it.
It's like the game bleeds you small chunks of time to artificially pad the game. Oh sure, individually each time you have to pause to flip a switch or push a button, it's a few seconds… but added all together, I think my total time in game standing at a switch waiting for Cloud to decide to press it was about 5 hours.
I think this game would have worked a LOT better as a more streamlined 25 hour experience. I really enjoyed some of the expanded storytelling, like in Chapter 4 getting to go to the upper plate with Jessie, or the entirety of Wall Market's chapter, but a lot of the "mercenary work" and non-optional dungeons the game forces Cloud to do were just an absolute chore, slowed the story down for no reason at all, and felt artificially bolted on. The secret Shinra lab beneath Sector 7 was just about the worst thing in a Final Fantasy VII product since Genesis.
Musical Motifs a Barely Skip a Beat
I think the final thing I want to touch on is the music. Final Fantasy VII's OST is probably one of my personal favorites in all of gaming and the remake does a lot of the music justice in fully orchestrating it. The number of different renditions of the battle and boss theme had me grinning from ear to ear. Some of the new music has even made it into my rotation of whistled tunes…as much as I dislike the Whispers as concept in the game, the theme that plays whenever they show up has burrowed itself into my brain. But the opening section of the Mako reactor just doesn't have the same feel to it as the original, and I'm really upset they changed the music that plays in the Wall Market to this really upbeat tempo thing that gives me vibes like I'm in Las Vegas or something. The original theme made Wall Market feel like a nasty, dirty place where you don't want to touch anything for fear of contracting some disease, and that feels more on point for life beneath the plate.
So with only two disappointments in 40 hours of gameplay, overall, the music is really good and worked for me personally
Hey Nephtes, Why Don't You Shut Up Already?
Well it appears I've gone and done it again…3000 words for a forum post that I doubt anyone will actually take the time to read, but whatever…
My takeaway:
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a flawed product that was sold as an Final Fantasy VII experience for everyone newcomer and veteran alike, but is actually a sequel crafted explicitly to returning fans with little regard for newcomers. It's competent gameplay, mostly gorgeous graphics, good voice acting, fun characters, and superb musical score cannot help FFVII Remake escape the orbit of everything holding it back: awful pacing, some of the worst padding in a game ever, a story only accessible to longtime fans, and the extra baggage of SquareEnix still 23 years later not giving fans a coherent version of the original story told in Final Fantasy VII married to a consistent art style and turn based gameplay.
It's been 3 days since I finished Final Fantasy VII: Remake. I've been unpacking a lot of thoughts. I was always very skeptical of the remake since it's reveal for a myriad of reasons:
1. Switching the combat from turn based to real time after the horror that was FFXV
2. Chopping the game into pieces
3. Making changes to the story.
4. Fear of padding the game up with useless fluff and crappy modern fetch quests.
5. Fear of Nomura Nomuraing things up.
Having finished the game, some of my fears were clearly warranted (awful side quests, padding, Nomura), others turned out to be my favorite decisions the team made (action based combat, so goooood). At the end of the day, the state of Final Fantasy VII Remake has left me confused as to if I loved it or hated it, and honestly, it's complicated. Can it be both?
Bait and Switch
Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: FFVII Remake is NOT a remake, it's a straight up sequel. Perhaps "Redo" would be a more apropos term? Quite frankly this game is the biggest bait and switch we've had in a AAA game since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty introduced us to Raiden.
Viewed as a sequel, I FUCKING LOVE THIS GAME.
It's one of the best things to come out of SquareEnix in years. Viewed as a REMAKE of one of the most beloved games of all time however, it fails on every level and I hate it with a passion.
Here's the problem: we were sold a remake, but got a sequel.
The lore of FFVII Remake rests firmly on the shoulders of FFVII so much so, that I feel bad for newcomers to the game. There's SO MUCH that goes on in the final chapters of the game that is directly reliant on knowledge of FFVII to understand the stakes going on. Nomura and crew seem to have designed the game explicitly for veteran FFVII players who know and understand the stakes from having played FFVII to its completion at the expense of new players hoping FFVII Remake IS the definitive experience of Final Fantasy VII, which it's not.
Having played through the original FFVII recently, I can confidently say FFVII is the first and largest barrier to entry to the new player. The 1997 original FFVII is a VERY flawed piece of media in 2020. Hell, the original FFVII was already a flawed piece of media just 5 years after its original release: the art styles featured within the game were schizophrenic at best, the translation was subpar, and some of the scenes have aged like fine mayonnaise … that's been left out in the sun…for a week. I'm looking at you "fun snowboarding minigame after you just buried your girlfriend scene.
An Alternate Dimension
Let's go back in time to 2014. Final Fantasy VII Remake has not been announced. We're at the Playstation Experience. Final Fantasy Brand Manager, Shinji Hashimoto, comes out and announces: "FINAL FANTASY VII Remastered" is coming to Playstation in 2015!
Final Fantasy Remastered is THE DEFINITIVE version of Final Fantasy VII:
· It looks NOTHING like Advent Children (nothing against Advent Children, I love it)
· It features a completely redone translation with no voice acting.
· Static 2D backgrounds remastered and now presented in HD widescreen format.
· Turn based combat with updated graphics. (on the level of say Trials of Mana)
· A complete redo of the chibi character models that now more closely match the chibi character design art.
· All the art style is now coherent.
· Remade cinematics that look closer in quality to FFXI.
· The entire game is made for a very modest budget compared to FFVII Remake
"Well," you think, "This isn't exactly what I expected given how cool the PS3 FFVII tech demo was back in 2005, but this is pretty great! The art style is no longer schizophrenic, the translation is good, and I don't have to juggle 800 mods on the PC to get a decent looking game. It doesn't look like Advent Children, but it's a hell of a lot better than playing 1997 PSOne FFVII now with characters consisting of 8 polygons…"
Then, in 2018, at Sony's E3 Press Conference, Square Enix unveils Final Fantasy VII: Whispered Destiny. It's the Final Fantasy VII Remake we got in this dimension, and instead of being divisive, everyone is completely on board with Kitase and Nomura enlisting the player to help Cloud and company fight fate.
You Were the Bad Guy All Along
Obviously what I've presented is not the time line we're in, and we have FFVII Remake and its ending, which is divisive to say the least, and I believe the ending is divisive not because long time fans couldn't go along with it, but rather because Nomura not so subtly frames the players who have been asking for a proper Final Fantasy VII remake that has all the same story beats they loved in 1997 with a shiny new paint job as the bad guy.
This Whispers in FFVII, the ghost looking knock off Harry Potter dementors that constantly accost the characters in FFVII Remake any time they attempt to go off script, are the manifestation of the player base who wanted the story to stay the same as the original game. Nomura and company frame these Whispers as "the bad guy" and enlist you the player's help to destroy them. You become complicit in the action, killing fate and subconsciously granting Normura the ability to do whatever he wants with the rest of the Final Fantasy VII story.
ANYTHING IS UP FOR GRABS!
· Zack's not dead and joins the party!
· Aerith doesn't have to die!
· Cid doesn't have to be a wife beater!
· Jessie and Cloud can have their date!
· Cait Sith can be ejected from the game's lore completely!
· Vincent's Limit Breaks don't suck!
· Sephiroth could win!
· Sephiroth could win??
And that's the point. Nomura and Kitase want long time players to have a new experience, to not know what's going to happen next. And I can appreciate that. I can. I'm actually pretty excited to see what happens next now that there are stakes again…
But at the end of the day, many players, myself included, are still missing that Final Fantasy VII Remake we've been begging SquareEnix to make for years for all the reasons I've listed multiple times now (but mostly the God awful schizophrenic art style shifts). Also, I wish they would have been upfront with me about the Remake and not subverted my expectations by calling it "Remake". I still would have bought it, but instead of being frustrated every time they deviated from the story, I could have enjoyed it. (My post history on ResetEra should tell you that I really disliked the game as I was playing it).
Required Reading Never Looked so Shitty
In retrospect, numbered Final Fantasy games not actually being sequels was one of the smartest design decisions ever. Videogames have a tendency to age incredibly poorly. Some games like Super Mario Bros. are timeless, but many others just don't age well for a myriad of reasons we won't get into here. So when a new Final Fantasy game comes out, you can generally just ignore the previous numbered game, because the new one is its own self-contained game.
But that isn't the case with FFVII Remake. As stated earlier, it's clearly a sequel. A sequel with "required reading". One advantage movies have to games with overarching narratives is that they're short and can be consumed in very little time. If everyone was jazzed to see Star Wars IX and you didn't see I through VIII, no big deal, you can catch up pretty quickly. Not the case with videogames which can span from 6 to 50+ hours for one entry in a series.
Another advantage movies have over games is that they tend to still be very watchable many many years later. I can show Star Wars from 1977 to a newcomer today and they'd probably come away liking it very much. I don't know that I can say the same for Final Fantasy VII. I can personally still enjoy it because I have nostalgia for it, but what would a new player born after the year 2000 seeing the original game think?
Now that the original FFVII is required viewing to properly understand FFVII Remake, will newcomers pick it up and play it in its current state? I would suggest not.
There's gambling on the part of SquareEnix here. FFVII Remake sold like gangbusters based because everyone expected it was a proper remake of FFVII, not a sequel. But how will Part II do? Will newcomers to FFVII stick with the game and move on to Part 2 having been left out of loop on the ending, or will they drop the series completely, not understanding WHY FFVII was a big deal in the first place? Will newcomers go "huh, that was weird" and buy/playthrough the original FFVII to get the context required by the ending to FFVII Remake? I don't know, but damn don't you think it'd be great if we had a proper FFVII Remastered edition for people to buy that would lower the barrier to entry? I do.
Have I not talked the Good Stuff yet?
There's of course more to FFVII Remake than the meta context of the story, and honestly, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the gameplay. I have some minor quibbles about party members basically standing around when you're not directly controlling them; seriously the number of times I would swap to Barrett and he's literally pointing away from the only enemy we're fighting were quite frustrating, but it didn't take away from the fact that the combat in FFVII Remake is good. Really good.
Am I grading it on a curve? Maybe.
I mean, the combat in FFVII Remake no Dark Souls or Devil May Cry, but it's a HUGE step forward from FFXV's combat situation where you only get to control one character, there's no magic to speak of (the magic item things don't count), and the camera actively got in your way. The combat in FFVII Remake is a really nice call back to the original FFVII, and the materia system was brought over intact, so props to Kitase and team. This was the one area I expected the team to turn in another FFXV or Kingdom Hearts and they didn't.
I would definitely like some quality of life improvements for FFVII Remake Part 2 though. There's a severe lack of "All" materia ("Magnify" in this game) that lets you target all your party or all enemies in the fight. And that's fine, I was okay with that limitation. But I wish there was a way to re-assign materia during the fight. There were a lot of instances where I'd get into a boss battle and analyze the boss and deal with its tactics for a bit and realize I had the wrong materia equipped to properly deal with the situation which would lead to a death and a lengthy loading screen. This was probably an issue on my first FFVII playthrough as well, but that was back in 1997 and I was 16, so who knows. Anyway, I think it'd be great if you could say spend 2 AP bars to get to a menu to swap materia.
There was much said about "air combat" being crappy in this game, and while I agree, it honestly didn't bother me too much in the long run, especially if I had Barrett in my party. For the sequel, I think it'd be cool if you could swap in and out characters on the fly as well. Make that cost AP too. "Crap a flying enemy, let me swap Tifa out for Barrett so I can shoot them out of the sky.
Because that's another thing the game did really well: making the 5 playable characters play very differently. In the original FFVII the characters basically all played the same, afterall, it was turn based combat, you directed them to attack, defend, use magic or items, and a skill here or there provided by materia and that was basically the end of it. The fact that Tifa has this crazy combo system, and Barrett is a walking turret and Aerith is a glass canon was really well executed. I very much loved how they gave Aerith a standard magical attack instead of having her smack things with her staff.
Let's Get Textural
Are there some issues with textures in FFVII being less than optimal. Yes. In my 40 hours of playing through the game did it hamper my experience? No, not really. There's a lot in FFVII to hate on. A LOT. But I really don't believe the graphics is one of them. The main cast of characters are some of the best looking characters in any game with realistic looking clothing and very expressive eyes and mouths. The set pieces are really good, and yes there's a LOT of copy and pasting going on with some of the environments, but that's not the graphic designer's fault. That's a different problem…
This Padding isn't so Fetching
Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a well-paced game. Its 40+ hour length seeks to be a value proposition since you're not getting the "full fat" FFVII experience, only the first 1/3rd of the first disc of the original game's content, but it only gets to this lengthy runtime through padding the game out with some of the most egregious time wasters I've ever seen in a game.
Maybe you're expecting me to mention the numerous fetch quests or squeezing through narrow gaps to conceal loading times as the worst offenders, and yeah they're pretty bad, but plenty of people have already talked about those. Yes, they're bad and I could have done with less of the standard JRPG trope sidequests to help a kid find her dumb cats but no…
No, the worst bits of padding in this game are the seconds the game adds onto top of just about everything. So much of this game forces Cloud to slowly walk. For no reason. In many cases it's in areas where we're not moving from place to place, so no loading should be going on, and yet, Cloud is forced to walk at a snail's pace, for no reason. The other bits of padding are also switches, levers, and buttons.
Why does Cloud have to sit and think about pressing a button, flipping a switch or pulling a lever? Every time, you sit and hold the triangle button for an agonizingly long time while Cloud just sits there with his hand on the lever…. Till…eventually… finally… any day now…. He just nonchalantly flips it.
It's like the game bleeds you small chunks of time to artificially pad the game. Oh sure, individually each time you have to pause to flip a switch or push a button, it's a few seconds… but added all together, I think my total time in game standing at a switch waiting for Cloud to decide to press it was about 5 hours.
I think this game would have worked a LOT better as a more streamlined 25 hour experience. I really enjoyed some of the expanded storytelling, like in Chapter 4 getting to go to the upper plate with Jessie, or the entirety of Wall Market's chapter, but a lot of the "mercenary work" and non-optional dungeons the game forces Cloud to do were just an absolute chore, slowed the story down for no reason at all, and felt artificially bolted on. The secret Shinra lab beneath Sector 7 was just about the worst thing in a Final Fantasy VII product since Genesis.
Musical Motifs a Barely Skip a Beat
I think the final thing I want to touch on is the music. Final Fantasy VII's OST is probably one of my personal favorites in all of gaming and the remake does a lot of the music justice in fully orchestrating it. The number of different renditions of the battle and boss theme had me grinning from ear to ear. Some of the new music has even made it into my rotation of whistled tunes…as much as I dislike the Whispers as concept in the game, the theme that plays whenever they show up has burrowed itself into my brain. But the opening section of the Mako reactor just doesn't have the same feel to it as the original, and I'm really upset they changed the music that plays in the Wall Market to this really upbeat tempo thing that gives me vibes like I'm in Las Vegas or something. The original theme made Wall Market feel like a nasty, dirty place where you don't want to touch anything for fear of contracting some disease, and that feels more on point for life beneath the plate.
So with only two disappointments in 40 hours of gameplay, overall, the music is really good and worked for me personally
Hey Nephtes, Why Don't You Shut Up Already?
Well it appears I've gone and done it again…3000 words for a forum post that I doubt anyone will actually take the time to read, but whatever…
My takeaway:
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a flawed product that was sold as an Final Fantasy VII experience for everyone newcomer and veteran alike, but is actually a sequel crafted explicitly to returning fans with little regard for newcomers. It's competent gameplay, mostly gorgeous graphics, good voice acting, fun characters, and superb musical score cannot help FFVII Remake escape the orbit of everything holding it back: awful pacing, some of the worst padding in a game ever, a story only accessible to longtime fans, and the extra baggage of SquareEnix still 23 years later not giving fans a coherent version of the original story told in Final Fantasy VII married to a consistent art style and turn based gameplay.
Ha! Tim Rogers agrees with my opinion that Tifa's English VA is actually the best one in Remake. Validation.
Although I think Cloud's and Red XIII's are just as good.
Although I think Cloud's and Red XIII's are just as good.
It's on his Twitch channel.
It's 2:06:46.
....
Don't worry, I read your post.
It's a....Requel.
The game does market itself more towards veterans but that doesn't mean that the knowledge that veterans don't know already know going in won't be provided to newcomers down the line. Besides, you're meant to be confused from the ending. From what I've seen, most newcomers got the gist of everything. It's only the second half of chapter 18 that confused them as it did with a lot of veterans too.
And I'll always come back to this point that just because they put it on the table for that players that they can change everything., it doesn't mean that they will change everything. Are they going to change the actual DNA of the story or are they trying to make players uneasy with the fact that things can change and so we can no longer be comfortable with our previous knowledge of how the story play?
Personally, I'm more the latter type.
It's an ending designed to make you uneasy, speculate and not to be certain of anything. Hell, Nomura says as much when he says that they put "The Unknowable Journey Continues" in order to make people uncomfortable.
You also have to follow the narrative seeds of some of what they've set up which is the same as the narrative seeds of what they set up in the Original in most places.
You always put a smile on my face with these Tifa gifs.
I agree.
Everyone did a good job the only ones I don't have much fondness for is Barret and Aerith but that's because of the voice archetypes they are given based off the Japanese. Never liked any iteration of Aerith's voice in anything (this one is clearly the best though). That high pitch, sweet, innocent waifu voice always annoy me. Barret I wish they would make him sound like he did in the beginning part of the Bombing mission before he turns into Mr. T.
Would anyone else have been satisfied if the game ended after the bike chase? I feel like if they had made Jenova, with that amazing boss theme, the final boss and then have the chase, with its theme being a culmination basically every battle theme in the game, just be a set piece , it would've still worked. Kinda like how Jecht is the actual final boss of FFX and Yu Yevon a set piece.
Yeah, Aerith doesn't really have that high pitch in Japanese that she does in English. IDK who started it first for the English dub but each succeeding Aerith actress has been building off of the previous English Aerith. Bri's far and away the best Aerith but it's a low bar
Sure, I would've been fine with that. I don't mind this ending either though. I understand what they're trying to do and get the value in it.
Yep great fights but as I'm replaying the original I'm like oh, you can't do a lot of the cool Sephiroth build up moments now that Cloud and Sephiroth were Advent Children fighting in space.
It's funny that when I finished the remake I hadn't played the original in a few years and was totally ok with them changing things up. But as I'm almost done with my replay of the original I'm realizing how much I want that original story now too lol.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt until they fuck up for now.
Honestly, I felt nothing fighting Sephiroth in this game. It's not that it was bad, I just felt nothing.
There was just no emotional investment. Sephiroth is completely shrouded in mystery in this game, to the point where we have almost no idea what he wants or why we need to kill him. We're just told to do it because we're told he's bad. He's a stranger to most of the party at this point. Cloud and Tifa obviously have history with him but they haven't gotten around explaining it yet. I guess it would've been worse with Jenova since the party knows even less about her. Idk, the whole time my attitude was like "guess I'll kill Sephiroth now." The fight is more spectacle than anything.
I felt something...
Upset they felt that it was okay to cut/paste the final fight of OG Final Fantasy VII into the final fight of FFVII Remake Part 1... but didn't feel the need to cut/paste Cloud's telling of the Nibelheim incident from Kalm into Chapter 17...
Honestly, that one thing would have done SO MUCH for new players before the final fight with Sephiroth in the remake.
I wish they would have spent the time to tell the Nibelheim incident over whatever we got in that dumb secret Shinra lab under sector 7 this entire time... 🙄
Erm, where in OG FF7 did we have an incredible fight like that with human Sephiroth?
I agree, tho, that moving the Nibelheim flashback to before they left Shinra HQ would've been a neat way to contextualize Sephiroth.
Even so, I'm already 100 times more emotionally invested in these characters in Remake than I ever was at any point in the OG. But I played through the OG for the first time in like 2017 so it was a bit dated at that point.
That part was so trash. I couldn't believe what I was playing. It's a good thing everything after it was so amazing.
The emotional investment comes from you playing the OG. These games are connected. There is continuation here between the OG and the Remake.
Hold up hold up
Where's Tifa's scar?
Even this fanart got it right:
Tifa's never had a scar. That was just a fan theory that people liked and Dead Fantasy went with.
Literally the final fight in FFVII is 1 vs 1 Cloud vs human Sephiroth after you beat Safer Sephiroth...
And it's super cathartic because you get to finish him with the Omnislash limit...
hey look, I found it:
edit: this shit was epic in 1997...
Last edited:
How is this possible?
The OG and AC even hinted at it since adult Tifa (unlike her youger self) never shows cleavage that would make the scar apparent.
I think they just want to save that flashback as the Prologue for Part 2. It lets them begin the game with a bang and they didn't want to blow their whole load here.
She's shown cleavage before in the OG.
Again, that was always a fan theory.
She's shown cleavage before in the OG.
Again, that was always a fan theory.
How is this possible that she has no scar?
That dress in the OG is too low-resolution to show anything. Plus, presumably the scar could be lower and thus not visible even with it.
Huh, I remember Safer and Omnislash but not that it was against human Sephiroth. This must be how Cloud feels when he grabs his head seeing images.
Same. That fight is there because the developers wanted to make a Sephiroth fight, not because the story demanded it. Zero stakes.
They got magic in this world. Zangan mentions that he performed the Cure Spell several times on Tifa while she was injured so I guess that stopped a scar from forming.
Her having a scar was just an assumption by some fans.
To me it still wasn't there because he's still completely shrouded in mystery. Is it the OG Sephiroth? Is it a new one that knows the OG events? How does he know the OG events? We know nothing. It felt like I was just fighting some guy.
Alexander's size differes from game to game. Only time he was ever really MASSIVE was in FFIX (and FF Type-0). Not sure about FFXIV and if we wanna get technical, Alexander was based off the artwork of FFIV's Giant of Babil (which was massive, but not a summon in that game).This is a ways off, but I have some ideas for how they could handle a certain scenario in what I think will be Part 3:
Vs. Diamond Weapon
Fighting the Godzilla-sized Diamond Weapon is hard to imagine with the party alone, since it's doubtful it will send out smaller extensions of itself like the Harbinger did with the three Whispers.
However...
What if prior to the battle, there is a cutscene where the party obtains a summoning materia that flickers oddly, like a lightbulb on the fritz, and it doesn't appear to work... until a cutscene at the start of this battle where, regardless of whether you have it equipped, it is shown glowing a full red and it summons, with no time limit...
Alexander, the cathedral colossus. It preoccupies Diamond Weapon while the party focuses on its feet or tail to throw it off balance so Alexander can deal devastating blows. Or something like that.
Or perhaps in this sequence the player is on rails in the Highwind firing artillery cannons at Diamond Weapon to soften it up for Alexander. Midgar's Sister Ray is still what ultimately kills Diamond Weapon, though. I imagine a Highwind fight of this sort would also work nicely for Ultima Weapon in the skies over Mideel.
Just some ideas. Would make for epic spectacle and marketing material.
I think Alexander might be around the size of the Pride and Joy (not fond of some of the name changes) boss.
That art is actually from Mobius and specifically depicts the FF7 Alexander, so they could depict him as a colossus in Remake. Would be groovy.